Saturday, 3 September 2016

Australian seat Barton makes history for the second time

God I need a break from the tragic laughable manoeuvres going on within Labour. So I am going to post of how you can find incredible political stories by luck.

There are two incredible stories related to the Australian federal seat of Barton both are worth reading

First there was the Facebook page that i shared of first Indigenous woman elected to the lower house of the Australian federal parliament, with Linda Burney claiming victory in the marginal seat of Barton.

can only wonder of the nature of Australia treatment of its indigenous people that this has taken so long '

In her maiden speech, Linda Burney wore a traditional kangaroo-skin cloak with her personal totem, the white cockatoo, known as the noisy messenger bird.

She lambasted calls for the Racial Discrimination Act to be watered down.

She warned that indigenous Australians still suffered disproportionately high rates of poverty and ill-health.

Usual protocol in the House of Representatives in Canberra was relaxed to allow a woman from Ms Burney's Wiradjuri clan to sing a welcome from the public gallery.

Referring to her people, she promised to bring the Wiradjuri fighting spirit into federal parliament.

"I was born at a time when the Australian government knew how how many sheep there were but not how many Aboriginal people," the former schoolteacher told the House."I was 10 years old before the '67 referendum fixed that. The first decade of my life was spent as a non-citizen."

An incredible story in its own right but looking at the history of the seat I found that Ms Burney's seat has a notorious past

It once elected as far as I know the only serial killer in a democratic legisture.

The Wikipedia entry for Barton led me to

Thomas John Ley (28 October 1880 – 29 July 1947) was an Australian politician who was convicted of murder in England. It is highly likely that he was also involved in the deaths of a number of people in Australia.In 1925, Ley was elected as the Nationalist Party of Australia member for Barton in the federal House of Representatives. Ley's fellow-conservatives (above allStanley Melbourne Bruce, Prime Minister since 1923) began to have doubts about him after the election. Accordingly, he was never appointed to a federal ministry, such as would normally have been expected with a man who had held a senior state government portfolio.During the 1925 federal campaign Ley had unsuccessfully tried to bribe his ALP opponent, Frederick McDonald, with a £2,000 share in a property at Kings Cross in return for withdrawing from the ballot. McDonald instead publicly revealed the attempted bribe. Ley won the election, and McDonald took the matter to court, but disappeared in mysterious circumstances; the case against Ley collapsed for lack of evidence when McDonald failed to appear.McDonald's disappearance may have been a coincidence. But in 1927, Hyman Goldstein (himself member for Coogee in the NSW parliament's lower house, and another of Ley's public critics) was found dead after apparently falling from "Suicide Point" on the cliffs of Coogee. Then a group of businessmen, concerned at Ley's reputation for dubious business dealings (SOS Prickly Pear Poisons Ltd being one of the more infamous), appointed Keith Greedor, an opponent of Ley but formerly an associate of his, to investigate. Travelling to Newcastle by boat, Greedor fell overboard and drowned.After his defeat in the 1928 election, Ley returned to England with Maggie Brook, his mistress of several years, leaving his wife in Australia.Little is recorded of Ley's life during the 1930s. About all that can be said for certain is that he used his move to England to start afresh in dubious business ventures, and during World War II he was arrested and convicted for black marketeeringIn 1946 Maggie Brook was living in Wimbledon, and Ley had his house at 5 Beaufort Gardens, London, converted into flats. Ley imagined (wrongly) that Brook and a barman called John McMain Mudie were lovers. Ley persuaded two of his labourers that Mudie was a blackmailer, and together they tortured and killed him. The case became known as the "Chalk-pit Murder" because Mudie's body was dumped in a Surrey chalk-pit.With Lawrence John Smith, Ley was tried at the Old Bailey, and both were sentenced to death in March 1947. However, both Smith and Ley escaped the noose: Smith's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, while Ley was declared insane and sent to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. There he died soon after of a cerebral haemorrhage. He is said to have been the wealthiest person ever to be a Broadmoor prisoner.

It makes some of the ridiculous accusations made by his "Labour" colleagues against Jeremy Corbyn look tame.And yet I'm back to this. Is there no escape?